Creating Cases in a Regulatory Agency

Abstract

The water pollution control officer possesses authority to invoke the criminal law in a secular world of recently defined social and economic regulation. The earliest stages of law enforcement in this setting involve tasks of discovery, identification, and detection where the evidence of rule-breaking is mobile and ephemeral and acquires significance in relation to its setting. Regulatory control employs both proactively and reactively organized techniques to circumvent problems of discovery and detection, allied with working rules which are part of the occupational practice of field officers. These rules offer guidance for the exercise of discretion about law enforcement action in settings characterized by high levels of uncertainty and autonomy; other rules are similarly employed in identifying the presence of pollutants in water, even though the matter is one ultimately to be settled by techniques of natural scientific measurement. Judgments about action are strongly tied to setting and draw upon a conception of the tolerable which has moral and organizational dimensions.